GOLDEN — When Republican congressional candidate Joe Coors in his TV ads says, “I’m not a beer,” it’s more than a campaign slogan; it’s a peek into a sometimes-painful past.

As the eldest in the fourth generation of the Coors dynasty, he was expected to one day take over the brewery. Instead, he was cut off without a penny for breaking the rule of the family’s patriarch: Marriage comes after college.

The sudden outcast and his bride lived in a $13-a-month, one-room apartment in Chapel Hill, N.C. The bed was a pullout couch, and to get to the bathroom or kitchen, they had to walk on the bed or fold it up.

During his lengthy exile, Coors bounced between jobs and towns instead of enjoying the perks and upward mobility of his birthright.

“We didn’t care. We were in love,” said Gail, his wife of 50 years.

The experience, Joe Coors said, taught him to stand on his own.

He eventually was allowed to return to the fold, became president of one of Coors’ enterprises and receives about $2 million annually from various family trusts.

The one-time black sheep of the family and political neophyte now harbors ambitions of representing Colorado’s 7th Congressional District in Washington, D.C. But his struggle, which he long ago described in a Los Angeles Times article, has become fodder for his opponents in Coors’ effort to unseat Democrat Ed Perlmutter.

Just as conservatives are lambasting Perlmutter for his voting record as a state senator and a congressman, the left is blistering Coors for his sometimes- startling comments in the Times piece.

Courtesy Joe Coors

Joe and Gail Coors were married April 14, 1962 in Chapel Hill, N.C.

That includes Coors’ belief that God has a habit of talking directly to him on the golf course, and Coors’ prediction that Armageddon would occur around 2000.

Recently, a liberal Colorado blog ran a photo illustration of Coors carrying a golf club and wearing a tinfoil hat.

“Joe Coors may be ‘Not a Beer,’ but there’s also a decent chance that he’s ‘Not All There,’ ” the blog wrote.

Joseph Coors Jr. was born in 1942, the eldest of five sons of Joe and Holly Coors, and the great-grandson of brewery founder Adolph Coors.

His mother, Holland Hanson Coors, was born in Bangor, Maine, and had moved to New York City to model when she met the elder Joe Coors in Nantucket, Mass.

She brought to the West a whiff of Eastern Seaboard aristocracy, expecting her sons to stand when she entered the room.

That pedigree melded with Joe Sr.’s German heritage, where fathers were known more for their discipline than their encouraging words.

Like his father and his uncles, Bill and Adolph III, Joe and his brothers attended the high school Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

When Joe was a junior at Exeter, he accompanied his roommate, Doug Fambrough, to his home in North Carolina, where he met Doug’s 15-year-old sister, Gail.

“She has such a sweet family, and that was so different from the environment I was used to,” Joe said. “They were loving and trusting and working together.”

Joe graduated from Exeter in 1960 and picked the University of North Carolina, rather than the Ivy League colleges favored by his family. He proposed to Gail in 1961.

It was during Christmas that year, when his grandfather, Adolph Coors II, told Joe about “the rule.” College comes first.

But Joe didn’t follow it. He and Gail were married April 14, 1962, in Chapel Hill. His parents and two older brothers attended, along with his maternal grandparents.

His paternal grandparents stayed home.

“The expectation was since I was the oldest boy in my generation, I would come back to the brewery. That would be my family assignment and opportunity,” Joe said. “When I got married, that was foreclosed on. I was cut off financially.”

“The elephant in the room”

Joe transferred to North Carolina State University to study engineering. After he graduated in 1964, he and Gail moved to Colorado and lived in an apartment complex in Lakewood. She taught second grade, and he worked as a stockbroker.

It wasn’t until after Joe and Gail had their first child, in October 1965, that his grandparents invited them to attend Sunday luncheons at the “big house,” Adolph Coors II’s home on the brewery property. The couple recalled that the luncheons felt “awkward” and that there was never a mention of Joe being pushed out of the family business.

“It was the elephant in the room,” Gail said.

“I had taken my path, and that was that,” Joe said.

His brother Jeff, who is three years younger, said the siblings didn’t get involved. The elder members of the family had made a decision, and that’s the way it was.

Joe left the brokerage in 1967 to work as a data-processing programmer for the “old Frontier Airlines,” and in 1969 he moved to San Diego to work for a school district as a systems analyst.

On a San Diego golf course in 1972,

on the 16th hole, Joe heard God telling him, “Go home. Go home.”

The couple decided he should return to Colorado and talk to his father.

“I was petrified,” Joe said. “Probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was ask my father for a job. He said, ‘Well, I’ll have to talk to your brothers and my brother.’ I didn’t hear from him for weeks.”

The next year saw Joe working in the data-processing department at Coors Porcelain, the firm that had saved the family during Prohibition and evolved into a high-tech company that produced technical ceramics, including computer chips. It later was renamed CoorsTek.

When Joe learned in 1977 he was being transferred from Golden to another Coors ceramics operation, Willbanks International in Oregon, he initially thought “they” were trying to get rid of him.

When the family visited Golden for Christmas in 1983, Joe said he and his father had a “career discussion.”

“He basically told me that if I ever wanted to come to Golden, I would have to be a janitor,” Joe said.

Although, by then, Joe was the president of the Oregon company, he took the remark to be his father’s way of saying if he came back to Colorado, he would have to start over.

But the following year, the president of Coors Porcelain became ill and another executive was ready to retire, and the decision was made to bring Joe in as a vice president. He and Gail bought a house in Jefferson County’s Applewood neighborhood, next door to Alice and Leonard Perlmutter, parents of the congressman Joe now is trying to defeat.

A look back at his past

By 1988, the role of the family black sheep had passed from Joe to his father, who had left his wife of 48 years and was living with a younger woman in California.

It was in this environment that a Los Angeles Times reporter came to Golden to write about the latest union skirmish with Adolph Coors Co., this time with the Teamsters.

Holly Coors told the Times that her husband had been too stern with their eldest son, too German, and that Joe Jr. “had it too hard.”

As for Joe, there was no measuring “the bitterness, hurt and anger he felt for many years” after “the family discarded him so harshly.”

Sitting at their dining-room table 24 years later, Joe and Gail looked at each other in shock when that portion of the article was read to them.

“Did I ever seem bitter or angry?” Joe asked.

“We liked what we did,” she said, shaking her head. “It made us independent.”

Not all of Joe’s comments in the article can be seen as ammunition for the left. He couldn’t understand why the company was so dead set against unions. He said he was wrong for thinking AIDS was God’s revenge on gays, although he still believed homosexuality was a sin.

How does Joe view gays these days?

“I’m not making any personal judgments,” he said, adding that if he made those kinds of judgments, he wouldn’t have the interactions he has had in recent years involving several prominent Democrats.

Former Gov. Roy Romer appointed Joe to the Colorado School of Mines’ Board of Trustees.

And former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb used to play with Joe on the same basketball team in a league for older guys.

Webb recalled one day asking Joe, “a decent guy, a nice guy,” about the charging and flagrant fouls that seemed to come Joe’s way and why he put up with it.

“He said, ‘If your name is Coors, you expect to get hit,’ ” Webb said. “I was taken aback. That’s why I remember it.”

Yet critics say that deep down Joe is as right-wing as his father — a man described by his own brother Bill as being “to the right of Attila the Hun.” And they note that in 2010, Joe Jr. donated $1,000 to a “personhood” ballot measure that would have basically outlawed birth control and abortions.

Joe disagrees, saying he doesn’t view himself as extreme but as a visionary.

“I’m always looking at how can we go forward,” he said. “That’s how we transformed CoorsTek into the premier technical-ceramics company.”

And so it is that as Joe Coors embarks on what he hopes will be his next career change, he finds himself embracing his family name — while also holding it at something of a distance.

It’s time to stop Washington’s reckless borrowing and spending. We need to send common-sense businesspeople to Congress.

I’m not a career politician. I’m a husband, a father, a grandfather concerned about our future.

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